#stillspaces

[dogsliampaynedoesntinstagram]

i’m curious, do you mind explaining or linking the queer eye communism discussion and tan’s politics?

The whole video is actually really fun.  But there’s something about the dynamic in the communism section in particular, which is hilarious to me.

[oneshortdamnfuse]

in that gifset of rami and eddie in the last one it really looks like he’s going in for a kiss

He did~! Rami is affectionate towards 99.9% of the actors he meets. He has kissed and cuddled so many. Kirsten Dunst described Rami as the biggest flirt when they were in high school, and it’s still true. He hugs, kisses, and cuddles to his heart’s content. Good for him.

[beyoncesdancers]

i’m a casual fan so i don’t have all the opinions everyone else does lol i’m just here to say kudos to the girls for dancing in heels every night. if i stand in heels for 15 minutes my feet start dying, i have no idea how they do it

i am replying so late i am so srry but YES. as someone who can barely walk in heels, dancing in heels for hours will forever be impressive to me!

[deutschtaeglich]

stillspaces: so what do most people say instead of love? ich mag... or es gefällt... instead? super interesting i never knew this before!

Sorry for literally just now answering your question :P But it’s a super good one and I wanted to make sure I answered it!! So when you want to say “oh I love your shirt” or “I really like the color” or whatever, you can say “Ich mag deinen Hemd” or “Die Farbe gefällt mir,” just like you said. When you are talking to people, you say things a little differently (and it’s important to spare yourself from some awkward conversations and unknowingly professing your love to someone haha). So, like we said before “Ich liebe dich” is really telling someone you love them in German. You say the to a person you’re in love with, and that’s it. When you want to tell your parents, friends, siblings, dog, whatever that you love them, you say “Ich habe dich lieb.” You can also say “ich mag dich,” but that’s “I like you.” It might be good to get things going to the “ich liebe dich” ;) haha 

I hope that answers your question!!! :)

[brolinskeep]

hi! i know this is a long shot but i was wondering if you could help me find a fic? it's a modern au and arthur is stuck repeating the same day over and over again after new years and to break the time loop he writes a number on himself. it's such a specific description but i haven't found it anywhere :(

sorry, dear, i haven’t read that one yet and cant find it either.

can anyone help?

[dogsliampaynedoesntinstagram]

stillspaces replied to your post “do women have to be the ones talking/singing about sex to be sexual...”

it’s not quite pop music, but i generally think hozier does a good job writing about women in his music. that may be because he takes a less literal approach in his writing and uses a lot of metaphor. for instance, (not sure if you’re familiar with his music) he recently released a song comparing his lover to a shrike, which is a bird that kills its prey by impaling it on thorns—a bit of a different take than “devil in between the sheets” etc

oh, and the song is aptly titled shrike if you would like to listen to it yourself

Hi anon,

Thanks for your thoughts. 

I haven’t listened to much of Hozier’s music, but I have had a look into that song and I think it’s really interesting. I interpreted it slightly differently - I think that Hozier is the Shrike and his lover is the thorn.  I could probably have opinions about how that metaphor related to heterosexuality as an insitution and ideas about men and women, but that’s not the point that I’m going to make in this post.  I think the specificity of the metaphor and the emotion it’s trying to describe ends up meaning that even if in some ways it reinforces ideas about heterosexuality and men and women it does more than that as well. 

One of the interesting questions I have is whether or not it’s possible to write music from a male voice that acknowledges women’s humanity within the pop genre.  Because I think specificity is a really important tool to creating more complex ideas about gender and sexuality, and the pop vocabulary tends towards the general and the universalisable. 

Or to be more specific - if a man is writing songs with the intention that htey resonate with an audience of young women who want men to be attracted to them within the pop genre (and I think the most important comment about Harry’s album is Alex’s point that this is what he was trying to do) - is it possible to do so in a way that acknowledges that women are people.  Does heterosexuality - in its most generaliseable forms in this society - deny women’s humanity?

What is particularly interesting to me, is how precise Harry is able to be about how women who want men to be attracted to them might feel validated. The writer of the Radio NZ review of his concert mentioned that her friend had a lyric from ‘Woman’ tattooed on her.  I’m fairly sure it’s: “You Flower, You Feast”.

And the more I thought about that line - the more effective I think it is and the more it shows an understanding of some of the demands that are placed on women and the fantasies that some women have about meeting those demends.  Flowers are beautiful and delicate - as women are endlessly told they should be.  Feasts have substance, can be satisfying and are worth devouring.  To tell a woman that she is both is to suggest that she’s achieving the impossible - successfully navigating the competing demands put on women.

I’ve gone a bit of tangent here, but it’s been really useful for me, because it’s helped me identify a central contradiction of Harry’s album.  There isn’t much space for women’s experiences and humanity on the album itself.  But the fact that it’s successful with what it’s trying to do, the fact that Harry’s album resonates with his audience, is only possible because there is an articulation that connects really specifically with some aspects of the impossiblity of being a woman.

[oneshortdamnfuse]

stillspaces replied to your photo “I think seeing all the languages spoken in our schools is pretty...”

i’ve never even heard of half of these this is so cool!

Some of these languages are Bantu languages which are mutually intelligible to a degree (able to be understood by speakers of each language), and they are commonly spoken in Birundi, Congo, Rwanda, and Uganda. e.g. Kinyarwanda speakers may be able to understand Kirundi speakers and vice versa. 

Others, like Chin, Burmese, Karen, and Karenni, all come from ethnic groups within Myanmar / Burma. Some of these speakers can also speak Thai, because they lived in refugee camps in Thailand. Chin, Karen, and Karenni represent ethnic groups who are persecuted in Burma. 

Our students from Afghanistan usually speak any combination of Hindi, Pashto, Pashto-Dary, and Persian. This group always interests me because they bridge our Middle-Eastern students with our Indian and Nepali students, who are further Southwest. 

That is, they can communicate with our Iraqi and Syrian students, but also our students from India and Nepal. Our students who speak Amharic, Oromo, Somali, and/or Kizigua usually speak with one another too. Most of these students come from Ethiopia, Somalia, and Kenya. 

Some of these languages are more isolated from others, so there’s really no one for our students to talk to outside of their ethnic group or outside of using English. Our Vietnamese group is small. Malagasy is a language spoken in Madagascar, and it’s not common for us to have students from there. 

The immigrants and refugees we receive depend on global events and trends. The Vietnamese population was much bigger before I was born, for example. Now, we’re seeing a lot of families from East and Central Africa, the Middle East, and Southwest Asia. 

We had more families from Europe, particularly Eastern Europe, when I was younger. A number of conflicts as well as the “end” of the Cold War brought families over. I’ve had one student from Albania and one from Belarus. The rest are first gen. Americans who are fairly fluent and bilingual. 

Plus -- a lot of Eastern Europeans are internally displaced in more recent conflicts. Our families were mostly forced to leave their home country even before coming here. Syrians went to Turkey. Karen went to Thailand. Bhutanese went to Nepal. Somalis went to Kenya. etc. 

Unfortunately, due to the ridiculous increase in vetting and the cap He Who Shall Not Be Named has put on the number of refugees who can enter the country every year, many of our families are fractured (half here/half oversees) and our numbers have dwindled :///